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By Rita Carter

JAMES can tell you the precise time—to the second—without looking
at a clock. Jennifer can measure anything to within a fraction of an inch just
by glancing at it. And Christopher can speak 24 languages—including a
couple of his own devising. Amazing? Definitely. But unusual? Not necessarily.
According to a controversial new theory you too can do these things. Or at least
you could—if only you could just stop being so clever for a moment.

Christopher, James and Jennifer are autistic savants—people who score
low on IQ tests and have severe difficulties in communicating and interacting
with others but who nevertheless have seemingly superhuman competence in a
specific area like music, art or maths. About one in ten autistic people have
notable talents, but truly prodigious savants like Stephen Wiltshire, who can
draw spectacularly detailed and accurate representations of buildings, or the
lightning card-counting calculator played by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain
Man are very rare. There have probably only been about 100 people described
as savants since the phenomenon was first identified a century ago and only
about 25 are alive at the moment.

Such is our fascination with these people that nearly all of them are
publicly known and celebrated, and many of their skills have been studied
exhaustively. Yet there is still no generally accepted understanding of how
savants do whatever it is that they do. Theories range from enlargements of
certain specialised brain regions to the simple “practice makes
perfect”—but none of them alone satisfactorily explains all the weird
anomalies.